izigame.me

Ogu and the Secret Forest is a game in the style of the 2D Zeldas and is a very good game in that genre, easily worthy of the Overwhelmingly Positive rating the game currently has.

Unless you go for the true ending, which involves about 99% game completion and dumps all the fun into the landfill.

- The big problem with the true ending is that you need to fully complete all the museum collections. Some of these are reasonable, but the fish and especially the bugs are reminiscent of the figurine collections in Wind Waker and Minish Cap. To be fair, there is a mechanic that makes it easier to collect the bugs/fish you're missing; unfortunately, this mechanic is unlocked by for collecting the two sigils that I did last, is still infuriatingly random and prone to giving you the wrong item, and you still have to suffer through the other categories.

- You also are locked out of obtaining an entire category of museum collectible without a specific upgrade from a specific map region, which happens to be in the same region as the sigil I did last. I want to be very clear on this: the ability to do the middle 4 sigils in any order is great and something a lot of 2D Zelda fans will love, but there's a hidden "correct" order to do them after all and that turned the whole thing sour for me. I might not have had to grind nearly as much if I'd picked the "correct" region to do first.

As for the rest of 100% completion, there are a couple additional problems that crop up if you're foolish enough to think the worst is over:

- The biggest offender is the tennis minigame, which has an achievement (the rarest in the game, for good reason) awarded for not letting your opponent score a single point. The problem is twofold: your hits always send the ball within 5 degrees or so of straight down the court while your opponent can hit at any angle they so desire, and this is the one part of the game where the hit detection on your attacks breaks down entirely because sometimes the ball just goes through your net and you lose a point for no good reason. It took me 15 minutes of attempts just to get a successful normal victory, which is first to six points; I didn't even bother trying for the achievement.

- The next rarest achievement is cooking every dish. This requires catching a whole bunch of max level (i.e. ultra-rare) fish due to the surfeit of recipes that require one (or even two). It also involves pure guesswork for some of the recipes, particularly the fried salt (which has no use whatsoever aside from padding out your recipe book). I only got this achievement because I won the last specialty dish I was missing from a randomly-spawning minigame, I have no idea where you're supposed to get its recipe from normally. For reference, the third rarest achievement after tennis and cooking is completing the pottery display, which requires doing the pottery minigame 50 times or so and is time consuming but trivial and RNG/guesswork free.

- Upgrading your hats is unreasonably grindy for no particular reward. We're talking stacks of 5-10 very rare drops and 15-20 ores that need to be crafted through a minigame one at a time. Or 20-plus pieces of fancy grass from a plant that only drops like 1 or 2 pieces from every 100 plants you cut. Meanwhile the only upgraded hat I ever really used was the angry monkey mask that gave attack/speed buffs, and I honestly could have just used food instead.

Oh, and if I ran this game at the same time as any other programs like my web browser or Discord, either the game would crash while loading my file or the other programs would crash while the game kept running. My best guess is this is some kind of memory allocation issue, which it's truly bizarre because a 2D game should not be nearly intense enough to cause this sort of behavior when none of the 3D games I've played in the last several years had problems like this.

I did genuinely enjoy most of my time with this game, but because of the endgame grind (and minor technical problems) I can't wholeheartedly recommend it to people like me who like seeing the full endings to their games.

This is everything you could want out of an adventure game. The art and design is charming and cute. The game play is nearly flawless. And it even gives you a "farewell" from all of the characters you've helped along the way. Even before continuing further I believe any adventure game lover should play this. It felt like the first time I played Ocarina of Time. But with a bit more depth and care.

Graphics are ok, some cut scenes were low res, despite the game supporting 4k. But they are only cut scenes you really don't need full resolution. Otherwise no visual complaints, it's exactly everything you expect it visually to be.

Gameplay is, like I said, nearly flawless. I played on keyboard and arrow keys, a controller may have felt better. But combat is clean, and doesn't get complicated too quickly. And only gets as complicated as you can manage. There is alot of colectibles that you collect throughout the gameplay, and then can finish before or after credits roll. My play through I had collected about 45% of all collectibles by the time I rolled credits. But depending on the order you play the game you may get more or less. As well as being required to go back to areas that you completed already for secrets and more challenges. But you'll do nearly everything just following the natural flow of the quests. Just don't get too caught up on where to go after the map get's opened up and you can explore. Just pick an area to start and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

Story. it's a simple isekai, where you are the one of legend to protect the world from the evil god. But the side quests are just as enjoyable and interesting. Some are smaller, some larger, but 95% are fun. A couple I had trouble finding the "clue" that the game had so I looked up a guide.

Puzzles. They weren't that hard, some were head scratchers. Others I needed to write things down before attempting to solve. And only a couple I had to look up. For the most part, they are easy. The puzzles progress well, and never throws you in the deep end. But at the same time never holds your hand, you still have to figure the logic out.

This has been my best gaming experience start to finish. 4.9/5. It's not perfect, but might as well be. And it deserves a speed running community.

This is a conditional recommendation. You will need the following to enjoy this game as intended:

Typical color vision (although some of the puzzles have alternative glyphs)
The ability to mash buttons
The ability to react to QTEs within a quarter second
Audio and the ability to both hear and differentiate tones

There are no accessibility options for any of those. Combat, on the other hand, has baby mode, which prevents you from dying. You'd have to be able to play similar games rather well to play without it.

Let me explain the gravity of these issues; while you can brute force the audio puzzles, there are quests that require high level food to pass. If you fail the Dance Dance Revolution minigame, you lose your ingredients. High level fish are a rare reward from QTE fishing which has a quarter second window, placed randomly within the fish's jump (I was going to mod it out, so I checked the exact code). If you spend a few hours getting a specific hat, it always has the same timing, but even then you're looking at 5-15 minutes of grinding QTEs to get another high level fish to have a *chance* at making the dish again.

Many of the minigames with fail-states are passable on baby mode, but this game assumes a rather high level of both skill and physical ability. It's actually incredibly annoying and will likely prevent me from getting 100% completion simply because of the grind leading up to a very tight QTE.

Other times contrast between colors is very low, and it's impossible to see, much less react to, the color keys in combat when they occur, and it took me forever to figure out the lands are color-keyed, and I still can't differentiate them on maps or scrolls.

With that out of the way, the graphics, the audio, the animation, and the general feel are all amazing. It's a solid and fun game if you're able to either look past the accessibility issues or are fit enough to play it. It's been quite an enjoyable experience, if frustrating at times and with excessive grind and pacing issues.

I can't speak to the quality of the combat, it doesn't feel very good, but I'm on baby mode and have given up on trying to learn how combat works. It's much more of a frantic pace, like Binding of Isaac, as opposed to something more deliberate, like Dark Souls. I'm sure some people will love it, but since you can turn baby mode on and off in the middle of a session, it's not an issue to me.

So if you're looking for a nice, fun little game and all the above issues either don't apply to you or you'll deal with it, then I highly recommend this game. If you're frustrated by being unable to physically play half of the game, then I wouldn't recommend trying it.

It is aggressively adorable, though. A true child-like adventure of fantasy, except your dad keeps reading the Lord of the Rings at bedtime or something.